


Narissa's Fall

by scribblesandscreeds



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Body Horror, Post-Canon, karma's a Fenris shewolf, not very graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:01:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23518123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblesandscreeds/pseuds/scribblesandscreeds
Summary: The Artifact landed in water, and so did she.It was the Admonition. It didn't normally affect her like this, but this close to the fulfillment of the prophecy, the madness must be bubbling to the surface. It was the only reasonable explanation. It was not convenient.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	Narissa's Fall

**Author's Note:**

> Where did this come from? Where did the motivation to actually write it down come from? 
> 
> Can I have some more?

It had been a mistake to scream. She knew that, even as she was still falling, and screaming. 

She should have been saving her strength, and not wasting oxygen, for when she hit the water; but the air dragged itself out of her with no regard for what she might have to say about the matter.

Whatever was left in her lungs was forced out by the impact with the surface of the water, and she didn't have a chance to snatch in another breath to replace it before the surface was above her and rapidly retreating.

 _At least I died fighting._ She thought spitefully, though who she was directing her spite towards, she didn't know. Not any more. The ex-Borg bitch(well, Fenris she-wolf) wouldn't care how she died, as long as she did, for killing the other half-synth mongrel. Apparently they'd been friends, who knew?

Her descent slowed dramatically as the water resisted her. The rippling light above stopped pulling away from her, and a burning in her lungs and arm(why her arm?) let her know that she wasn't dead yet. She wondered how long it would take to drown.

 _Longer than this._ Narissa decided, and began to kick her way upwards.

* * *

Her arm was broken. This much was clear, as she dragged her way stubbornly onto the gantry that was just less than an arm's length above the surface of the alien water. In two places, she surmised, above and below her elbow. No matter. It had protected her head as she hit the water.

Air, strange smelling and alien but _air_ , filled and emptied her lungs in glorious great gasps. She allowed a few to come and go wildly before clamping down and seizing back control of her body.

 _Nearly dying is no excuse for lack of self control,_ she thought, then doubled over to vomit otherworldly mineral-tanged water. 

She straightened up again, and took stock of where she was. One of the lower levels of stasis storage. It had been quite creepy when it had been full of drones, all held inert and harmless by being artificially frozen in time; now they were gone, and it was somehow creepier. The cube was powered down, all the stasis fields were off, so it was just as well that the alcoves' previous occupants were floating in the vacuum of space back where the facility used to be. Just as well she'd flushed all the filthy things out into open space, while they were deactivated and couldn't do anything about it.

Except something was off with some of the alcoves in the distance. Against all probability, a couple had slowly blinking lights, and there was something distorting the familiar shapes in the darkness. Curiosity beckoned her to come over and investigate, and got the better of her.

* * *

"What the fuck?" she blurted, although she knew at a glance exactly, the fuck, what.

Several of the alcoves were occupied. Moreover, she recognised who the one in front of her was occupied by.

"How repulsively morbid." she said with a sneer that took more effort than usual to fix to her face. "I wouldn't have expected such sentimentality from the Borg. But your pathetic little acolytes aren't even that, are they? Is this what passes for a death ritual among xBs, stuffing corpses back into Borg alcoves? Can't you think of anything less derivative?"

Hugh's eye flew open. This time, Narissa stifled her scream.

**We are Borg.**

"No, you aren't, you're dead." she said firmly. "And I'm hallucinating."

It was the Admonition. It didn't normally affect her like this, but this close to the fulfillment of the prophecy, the madness must be bubbling to the surface. It was the only reasonable explanation. It was not convenient.

**We are Borg. You will be assimilated.**

She scoffed.

"Into what? You don't have a collective, or a co-operative, or whatever it was you wanted to call your ridiculous pipe dream. You're utterly alone down here in the dark. Abandoned, discarded, and - why am I wasting my breath on a corpse? I killed you."

The hypoxia and the strain were getting to her. Hugh was dead, as dead as the day she'd lobbed a knife at him and the freakish boy Milat had yanked it out again, opening his throat to let the blood gush freely. Not that it would have made any real difference if he'd left it in, the blade was poisoned. No Zhat Vash or Tal Shiar would make a single-pronged attack when a double one was possible.

She could still make out the wound now, gaping whitely in his neck. His one real eye continued to stare, unblinkingly, at her. The fake one was gone. A black plate covered the socket and - as she watched - grew, nanobots crawling rapidly to the edges and solidifying in place, to connect to the vestigial stubs of the old implant. It bulged in the middle, and erupted to reveal a multispectral lens.

"Fascinating, but I don't have time for this." Narissa whispered. She had to contact Oh, and powered down, she would have to physically climb the levels of the Artifact to get to where she would be able to send a message. With only one working arm, it would be an arduous trek.

**You will be assimilated.**

"Not today, thank you."

She turned away from the alcove, and stopped. There was a figure blocking the gantry. She recognised the individual as one of the xBs Hugh had condemned to death, by refusing to tell her where the old man and Seb-Cheneb had gone. Recognition took a moment. There was a lot of hardware obscuring their body and face now.

"No." she said flatly. No, I will not be assimilated. No, I do not believe you are real. 

Clunking footsteps heralded more xBs(or were they just Bs now?), coming to join this one.

She turned to go the other way, and found herself face to face with another drone, this one fully augmented. She did not remember killing this one. She did not remember ever seeing this face before, though it bore a striking resemblance to Admiral Picard. Far younger though. And rather taller.

**You will be assimilated.**

The drone's one hazel eye stared at her with malevolent indifference and she tried to rationalise why she would be hallucinating one she had never met before.

Something touched her, grabbed her, and that - that wasn't possible. Hallucinations were not physical, they did not _touch_. 

_Oh shit._

She wasn't hallucinating.

**You will be assimilated.**

"No, I bloody won't." she muttered, and twisted to dive back into the water, but one of the drones gripped her broken arm and the searing agony turned the whole world green, robbing her of the valuable seconds that might have allowed her to escape. 

"I will _not_ be assimilated-" she choked as hands and claws and fuck knows what sort of grasping implements they had seized her from behind and they were real they were really there and the unfamiliar one was reaching for her-

Tubules extruded from his fingers, and there was only one way out. She was Zhat Vash. There had always been a possibility that she would have to take the last resort, though she'd never really thought she would actually have to do it. But just as she was trying to bite down on her capsule to spit death in his face, the assimilation tubules plunged through her skin, and she was paralysed.

**You will be assimilated**

* * *

_She is assaulted with an impossible barrage of sensory input. There are too many simultaneous images, from too many perspectives, for anything like a coherent picture to form and she’s functionally blind. She doesn’t need to see to know where she is, though, or when; she can hear the whir of automated drones flying by in the distance, she can feel the metal grating of the floor, some non-Romulan sense can somehow smell the cavernous space behind her; she remembers this. She was there - is there - but she isn’t looking through her own eyes. She’s looking at herself, from multiple different angles, looking at her guards. Looking at their disruptors, and the minds connected to the eyes she’s seeing through don’t know what’s going to happen, but she does.  
A thought breaks through._

_why are we standing here why is she pointing that thing at Hugh_

_"Where have you hidden Picard and the synth?"_

_She remembers making that demand, how completely in control she was, how they lived and died on her whim; but now she can’t even try to move._

_The visual chaos starts to settle into some sort of order, as her comprehension of vision expands beyond binocular and starts to make sense of the input from a dozen eyes at once._

_She can’t change it. This is a full-sensory record, in which she is something close to omniscient; but utterly impotent._

_She sees her own centurion point his disruptor at the person standing on the other side of the ledge(she has never, ever considered an xB to be a person)/at the person five/four/three/two places down the line/at his neighbour/at her friend/at his protege/stares down the barrel._

_he won't, will he? I didn't do anything, he won't-_

_She knows he will. Dread pools coldly in the pit of what is probably her own stomach as she feels one of the xBs shift their weight from one foot to another/the scar tissue over a missing eye itch but he mustn’t scratch/a phantom pain in a limb the Borg took long ago. She isn’t afraid of pain, she wouldn’t be much use in her vocation if she was; but even so she hates that she knows it’s coming and can’t do anything to avoid it._

_A punch of sound, a zip, a whir, it's quick but it hurts, it hurts like only being disintegrated from the inside out can hurt, it hurts until nothing can hurt any more-_

_“We know you led them into sub-sector 11, and that only you returned.”_

_Her own voice cuts through the ragged shock of taking a disruptor to the head and despite that one awareness burning out, remaining conscious with all the others. Her past self sounds so much calmer than she was, so deceptively coherent. She marvels at her ability to hold back the worst of her rage._

_They all know what’s in sub-sector 11 and for a fleeting moment she is angry that they managed to conceal this information from her, intends to punish them for it, the impulse firing before she can recognise that it is utterly futile. Everything those xBs saw that day, everything they heard, everything they felt, everything they thought; the whole confused, blurred, jumbled mess; it’s already happened._

_"I'm bored. Kill them all."_

_no please no I only just became myself please no let me live let me live let me live-  
am I still a tool am I still a pawn am I still disposable-  
how can you let them how can you let her-  
how dare she how fucking dare she I will be avenged someone will avenge me-  
are they worth me, Hugh? Are they worth my death-  
I don't understand does she mean-  
don't let them kill us Hugh stop them **do something-**  
_

_Seven sets of disruptor blasts at once, no-one should be able to experience more than one, but all of their memories together, at once-_

_She can’t scream. Everything turns red, turns magenta, turns green, according to each individual’s blood; but she can’t scream._

* * *

_After the combined fear and agony, after she dies their deaths, the memory changes. Now she’s deep in the bowels of the cube where few dare to tread, and badges on uniforms have a tendency to glow green._

_There are many more points of perspective now, but few of them are moving, so it’s not quite so hard to track what’s going on. She’s getting the hang of it, getting to grips with resolving all of that raw data into an impression of reality. It helps that this time there isn’t much to see. Most of them have their eyes closed, and are only hearing. A few look out across the mostly empty galleries, at mostly empty alcoves. Mostly._

_A handful of furtive figures carry lifeless bodies along the walkways. They swiftly but carefully install each one into an alcove, closing restraints around flaccid limbs to keep the bodies upright._

_A dissenter arrives, and challenges the group. Nearby ears pick up the exchange._

_"How can you even think of reassimilating them?"  
"Don't think of it as assimilation. Think of it as life support. The nanoprobes will repair their bodies, then, in time, they will be deassimilated again."_

_The dissenter is overruled, cannot prevent their dreadful lifesaving task. With surgical precision, the stasis field on each newly occupied alcove is disrupted just long enough for tubules to penetrate skin and nanoprobes to begin to swarm through bloodstreams and a consciousness returns for just long enough to think_

_not this not this no I was dead let me be dead again anything but this_

**We are Borg**

* * *

_She is back on the main platform. She is - he is sobbing over the bodies of his murdered children, devastated but not broken; and suddenly she wants to stop the words that are about to come from her own mouth because she has badly misjudged how much she has intimidated him._

_"They died because of you. Because you let Picard and the synthetic escape."_

_The knife pressed against his carotid artery has him scared, but his fear doesn’t extend much beyond the hand holding it. He’s afraid of what she can do, he’s not stupid; but what he feels for her personally shakes her. She assumed that he hated her, and relished the thought. She believed he feared her, recognised her superior power. But what she finds in his memory, even when he lies crumpled on the floor and wails over the carnage she’s wrought, is little more than contempt._

_have to take back the cube she's gone too far have to save them-  
Have to make her pay_

* * *

_No longer standing/lying on the gantry, no, now striding down a corridor. All the corridors look the same to her but he knows it’s sub-sector 9, and she knows it is too because she’s also around the corner, waiting to kill him. Which she intends to do whether he gives her an excuse or not._

_Oh, the boy is impressive, confused degenerate though he is; but her aim with a thrown blade is true and lethal. She sees it fly from her hand/he sees it fly towards him and feels her own gloating satisfaction at the sight of it hitting its mark for what feels like several whole seconds before he cottons on to what’s happened to him. He contributes a wave of disbelief then, before he’s fully registered that the artery she chose earlier is breached and understood what that means; he feels a cold chemical burn spread through his blood, and finally that brings the fear._

_No - I can't die - they need me, my xBs need me, the ones who survived need me-_

_He is frantic, but then as he dies he is comforted, and how is that fair? No-one is comforting her. No strong young warrior holds her in his arms as her life slips away, whispers promises to avenge her._

* * *

_It’s bright, the room is well lit and clinically clean. She sees only the light, glowing greenly through the delicate barrier of her eyelids, but she hears herself/her brash young niece talking nonsense, trying to fill the silence. Hears her belittle the greatest and most devastating trauma of her life; knows that she knows not of what she speaks._

_Oh, young one, it was not mere despair that disabled this cube. Do you think that no assimilee has ever despaired before? Do you imagine that Romulan despair is more powerful than Klingon rage, than Betazoid fear, than repressed, compressed, concentrated Vulcan pain? No, foolish child, it was not despair. It was the Admonition. The Borg are more than half synthetic; and they are all linked into one consciousness. What is known by one is known almost instantly by all. I Admonished them, girl, and the best they could do to prevent every drone in the collective from tearing its synthetic components to pieces out of sheer self-loathing, to keep the virus of self-awareness even partially contained, was to shut the whole cube down._

_She would kill to hold back what she knows she is about to(so nonchalantly, so stupidly) say._

_"I would have made a much better Borg than you."_

* * *

_And then it's cold, it's so cold. He stands - not under his own power - and restraints have been closed around his limbs, to keep him upright, to keep him trapped where the tools can do their work, unable to escape their reach. He forbade this. Some of his xBs floated the idea, once, that they could use the Borg technology to their own ends. That the dead could be resurrected via reassimilation and deassimilation. The thought had horrified him. Still horrifies him. Nothing could be worse than recapture into the Collective, he’d rather die, anyone would rather die. He forbade it._

_"This isn't right. It isn't what he would want."_  
_"This isn't what any of us would **want** , but it will bring him back-"_  


_In a way, it’s gratifying to know that they disobeyed him. Proves that they’re no longer mindlessly obedient drones. Is this irony? A paradox?_

_The assimilation tubules plunge and his individuality is taken. It isn’t quite like the first time - like being sucked into an ocean of consciousnesses, so many that they blur into a suffocating, amorphous mass - there are only a few minds here, and those are familiar, identifiable. Minds of individuals he has grieved. Friends he has lost._

_And one he does not know. One consciousness that doesn’t go back very far, isn’t aware of very much, only the transition from maturation chamber to alcove and a specific mission to subdue and absorb humanity. With so few component minds in this microcollective there is some distinction still between them; this one retains a name. Locutus. Not the original Locutus, a replacement. An upgrade. Locutus 2.0, as it were. Locutus 1.0 had activated him; not by any specific action or command but by his very proximity. As a result, he had been awake and aware when the airlocks opened. He had anchored himself. Stayed put. Survived._

_The xBs had prior awareness of him; Hugh never had a reason to suspect he even existed. Narissa never would have concerned herself with speculation about the drones under her jurisdiction. Those xBs who were extracted from this cube knew they had been in the company of the remade intermediary, the Borg’s missionary to Earth, cloned from the DNA of the original; it was to him that they had referred, in confusion, when they saw Picard and recognised Locutus. Because how could Locutus be walking around the upper levels of the cube when they knew he was in stasis storage down below?_

_Now he is assimilating them, activating them, the reclaimed escapees so haphazardly offered up to the alcoves and any hapless passerby. Building a collective with which to carry out his mission._

* * *

_I'm sorry Auntie I didn't know it was like this I didn't know it hurt so much I didn't **We are**_

_I didn't_ **We**

_I'm_ **Are**

_I_ **Borg**

_**We are Borg** _

It had been a mistake to scream. It got their attention.

**Author's Note:**

> Did you notice the lighting when Seven had her showdown with Narissa? They were very careful to remind us that there was water below them.
> 
> As to the new drone, well, he was in the promotional material, and he had a lot of ominous foreshadowing, appearing in flashes to Picard up until we finally got a good look at him at the end of Picard's PTSD flashback/meltdown on board the Artifact... and then we never saw him again. But he was lurking down there.
> 
>   
> That's one hell of a dramatic entrance for an unacknowledged red herring of a non-character.


End file.
